21 April, 2013

The Burger who didn’t want to be junk food

Once upon a time there was a
burger who had many lives. Each day she would wake up in the burger bar, and
patiently wait her turn to be cooked by the chefs, before being served to the
customers. While being eaten, she would do everything possible to make herself
really delicious, and with the customer’s final bite she would feel like the
lights had gone out and she had simply fallen asleep. The next day the whole
process would repeat itself.

The little burger could have
continued quietly living this way for many years if it hadn’t been for the fact
that, one day, while she was waiting her turn at the cooking range, she heard
one of the customers referring to her as “junk food”. And, boy, did this make
her angry! She was so furious that she almost spontaneously combusted.

From then on she realised that
many people used that term about her and her sisters. And after listening
closely to any radio or television program about junk food or healthy food, she
arrived at a horrifying conclusion: it was true, she was “junk food”.

Now she understood why most of
her favourite customers were now much fatter than they had been when she first
met them, and why those who came most often didn’t look too well. The burger
felt terrible; all this was her fault! So she tried to find some solution, some
way they could shake off that terrible name.

And then she hit on it. Whenever
she saw one of the kids who visited almost daily, she would choose the best
place to be chosen, and would wait to be served. Once he was with the child, and
the important moment wasn’t far off – the first bite - the burger would
concentrate as much as she could and... nothing happened. The child sank their
teeth into the burger and chewed the mouthful just as usual. Then along came
another bite, with the burger concentrating as before, but everything happened
just as before…

Several more bites and the burger was about to give up, when she heard the
child’s voice:

-"Blimey, how strange! This
burger doesn't taste of anything."

That was just the start of what turned
out to be a perfect plan. The burger convinced all her sisters not to have any
flavour whenever they were with a customer that visited too often, in return
for being even more tasty when the customer came only rarely.

In this way they began to see fewer
chubby, unhealthy-looking faces in the restaurant, and many of their old
familiar friends started looking much better, while getting to eat much tastier
burgers.

And these burgers became much
more popular from then on, because, everywhere, it's more enjoyable to taste
something after a while of not having had it.